Paper Ghosts_A Novel of Suspense Read online

  I picture the muscled knot in Carl’s forearm. His chuckling face when he heard my muffled scream through the door. The taut shape of him in the darkness, waiting. This scarf, torn from my hands, drawn tight across my neck until I see the glimmering, sunny spots of the end. Would you like a cigarette first, dear?

  I curl up on the bed. Coil my hands into fists.

  I want my sister.

  8

  I was in third grade when I kept my first secret from my big sister.

  Rachel was fifteen, always hanging out at theater practice, making faces, flirting with boys. I was lonely. I obsessed a lot. Anthrax and shark attacks were big news.

  I was also odd, with rituals. Kids sniffed this out no matter how many times Rachel tried to fix my hair like hers or picked out my clothes in the morning for school. I insisted on carrying a hiking backpack with a hidden pocket for my survival notebook instead of a sparkly one with Lizzie McGuire’s face. Once, when a teacher brought in a black kitten, I crossed my heart and spit over my shoulder onto the desk of the boy behind me.

  My mother worried about me. She had hammered up a Matisse poster on my bedroom wall, insisting it was bright and cheerful enough to scare away all the ghosts I invented. She didn’t know I closed my eyes every night worried that the yellow cat dabbing its paw in a vase of fishes was eventually going to succeed. That when I woke up, the cat would be gone and the water would be bloody. Le chat aux poissons rouges. Even its title sounded ominous.

  I’d found the old photograph in our house a month later in an envelope taped to the bottom of the attic stairs. My mother had sent me up with a flashlight to retrieve the snowman wreath she always hung on our door.

  A sliver of paper was peering through a crack on the step. When I reached around the side and underneath, I thought the envelope probably held directions to the attic fan or the furnace. The elderly woman who lived there before us was forever taping envelopes with instructions to the bottoms of drawers and cabinet doors. Rachel and I hadn’t quite given up hope that one of them would hold hundred-dollar bills.

  This one, though, was thinner, sweated with brown water stains. It held a black-and-white picture of two girls in a forest, about my age, little brides with white dresses and veils. They looked like twins. One girl was a blur of white motion, like she had just stepped out of the other. On the back of the print, there was another blur, of blue writing. Their names, the date—whatever had been written there—obliterated.

  I never considered this photograph strange. It felt magical, special, just for me. I was drawn into that forest like Alice to Wonderland. I taped the picture carefully to the wall at the back of my closet where no one would find it. I could tell that these were the kind of girls I wanted to be—girls who wandered unafraid, climbed trees too high, trapped creatures in jars, back-flipped across every open space, spit on boys on purpose.

  I used to part my hanging clothes like stage curtains, and they’d be waiting to play. I’d make up stories. Sketch their picture. Sometimes I pretended that one was me and one was Rachel, that we weren’t seven long years apart, that we had exploded into life at the same second and curled up to each other in the womb, that I never spent a single moment being alone or needing to be afraid of anything.

  Eventually, I made a real-life friend—a gawky, sweet girl who sat with me at lunch and only ate things that were orange. She kept secrets, too. She stole food out of her kitchen and concealed it all over her bedroom, never eating it. Once, I found a melted, unopened carton of chocolate ice cream under her bed. She made me feel normal.

  The picture curled up and fell on the closet floor.

  I forgot about the twins.

  I had no idea they would someday lead me to Rachel’s killer.

  9

  I’ve yanked the curtains open as far as they’ll go so that the sun floods the motel room. Carl’s sprawled in the orange plastic chair like a taunt, with jean-clad legs stretched out. Boots made out of a nasty snake crossed at the ankles. Lazy expression that has probably fooled a lot of people. Clear-eyed, in a good mood, like last night was just a freak event where we bumped into each other in the netherworld of dreams.

  Carl had banged his fist six times on the adjoining door at about 9 A.M. I’d been dragging out my minimal packing, hoping the longer I took, the more chance I’d find his bed made smooth as a cardboard box and Carl Feldman gone.

  Just one day in, and I’m thinking this way. One day in.

  I don’t bring up his little present. If Rachel’s death taught me anything, it is the tormenting power of silence. When I’d opened the door to the motel room, Carl had waited politely, suitcase in hand, until I gestured him over the threshold. He said he was getting worried about me. Do you always sleep this late? I couldn’t detect any guile. In fact, I hadn’t closed my eyes until after a call to Mrs. T, until the first dull light of morning whispered safe. Two uneasy hours of shut-eye, tops.

  I’d debated the merits of waking Mrs. T from a dead sleep. My panic won out. “What the hell time is it?” she’d screeched at me. “Why in good God do you care? No, I haven’t seen Lolita. Today is Tuesday. Girl’s regular as a clock. Not due to show until tomorrow.” And then, grumbling: “She did call at suppertime last night, looking for that hideous scarf.”

  I am already counting the extra money it will take for better hotels with real dead bolts. Texas posts speed limits of eighty-five miles an hour on some roads. I was shortening my timeline—eight days? seven?—and wanting to discount Mrs. T’s warnings about close sleeping arrangements. Make sure you can hear him holler. If he wakes up and doesn’t remember what’s on the other side of the door, that’s trouble.

  “I’m going to check the bathroom,” I say to Carl, “and then we can go.”

  He doesn’t acknowledge, just leans over and picks up the map I’ve spread out on the bed.

  I like to see Texas all at once, every vein and artery, because it is a body that will fool you. I won’t be relying on a bossy GPS voice to find my way. I don’t want to be tracked. Carl and I, we are both ghosts.

  Carl seems mesmerized by the three scattered red dots on the map, each like a fresh drop of blood, each representing a spot on earth where he stood and snapped a picture near where a girl disappeared. I’m hoping it’s going to be an eventful and fluid journey—that Carl will erase dots, add dots, whatever makes him talk, feel control, remember.

  Besides Rachel, I’ve linked ten missing girls to Carl’s photographs. For the purposes of my plan, I ruthlessly narrowed the list to three. I did this based on my gut and which girls’ eyes begged and dared me when I stared at their photographs. On which families touched me the most with their grief.

  These girls—these cold cases—are my insistent, beating hope, the only way I know to jog Carl’s conscience. I have to follow their stories, because in Rachel’s case, there is no story to tell, no dot. No one remembers a girl on a silver mountain bike that morning. No one knows if Rachel was on a new route to her job or took a shortcut. No one saw anything. She was simply gone.

  I close the door in the bathroom. Flush the toilet, run the tap water. Give the map time to gestate in his brain. Glance to the scarf tossed on the hook on the back of the door. I hadn’t wanted it to touch my clothes all night. For a second, I consider leaving it.

  When I come out, there’s no Carl. No map. The adjoining door is ajar. I give it a tentative push. At some point this morning, he has stripped his sheets, blankets, and bedspread and folded them into a stack of squares. A crisp twenty-dollar bill sits on top of the pile.

  Mrs. T said he didn’t have any cash.

  Both suitcases are gone. So is my purse. He’s taken everything but the change I’d strewn on the dresser for the housekeeper.

  I’m outside in seconds. The car is still parked in front of the room, exactly where it was when we pulled in last night. Carl’s in the passenger seat, his mouth moving animatedly. When he sees me, it snaps tight.

  I walk toward him, slowly looping
the scarf around my neck.

  10

  Carl hasn’t said a word about the scarf. I adjust it so it doesn’t drip into my coffee and slide the laminated menu back behind the sugar shaker. Our waitress is edging up the aisle with a tray, a couple of booths away.

  All night, my head was flooded with faces. Lolita, Violet, Rachel, the anonymous girl in Carl’s suitcase surrounded by a flood of red sand. I picture her pretty hair, hanging in a black snake down her back, the curly tip flipped up like it was about to strike.

  She’s one more enigmatic piece. One more possible victim.

  I’m stuffed to the bursting point with Carl. Photographs, criminal evidence, psychiatric reports, rumors, supposition, anything and everything I could hunt and find on the killer sitting across from me in this crap diner.

  The immense pressure of it rises into my throat.

  I pick out one tiny thing.

  “Why were you nicknamed the Rain Man?” I ask.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Just breakfast conversation.”

  “Sure it is. I guess a little breakfast conversation doesn’t hurt anything. At one time, I was only shooting pictures in the rain. It turned out to be a dumb idea. Difficult and limiting.” He shrugs. “It was the period after someone I loved died in a storm.”

  There isn’t a sliver of emotion on Carl’s face.

  It’s not the first time I’ve heard the story. The prosecutor told the jury it was pure public relations fairy tale. Don’t be fooled. This isn’t a romantic man, folks.

  Before I can follow up, Carl leans forward, his elbow scattering the six pills I laid out in a line in front of him on the blue-and-black-speckled Formica tabletop. “Let me make a little conversation. I’d remember if I ran around killing people. That’s what dementia patients do. They remember the past like it was fucking yesterday. I remember the first picture I ever shot, and I sure as hell remember what iced tea is supposed to taste like. So I’m pretty sure I’d remember what it was like to slit a throat.”

  I involuntarily jerk my head so that my hair falls over my left eye and cheek. Since childhood, this has been my tell, the one nervous tic I can’t seem to control no matter how much I practice. Carl knows. He’s eyed my hair tosses before, at Mrs. T’s.

  “Don’t worry,” Carl says. “Nobody’s listening. More privacy in an egg joint like this than on a computer. Me, I listen. I see every frame of life in pictures. Freeze here. Snap there. Can’t turn it off. The teenager in the booth behind me? She’s knocked up and wants an abortion. She’ll get it way before her belly pops up. The woman back of you? She got smacked again last night. Thinks she’s really getting a divorce this time. She won’t. By the way, I want a damn phone. Add it to my conditions.”

  This is the longest speech Carl has made in my presence. It’s both intelligent and predatory. A week ago, Carl told me he couldn’t remember ever being a documentary photographer, or even exactly what one was. The next day, he’d topped his conditions list with Camera.

  The diner is noisy, its booths packed. It was Carl’s idea to get right back out of the parked car at the motel and eat at this restaurant only steps away. Sixty-eight steps, to be exact. It bothers me, this new counting obsession of mine—of steps, of days, of money, of the pills that Carl is now tucking out of sight under the edge of his coffee saucer. Of the 4,566 days since Rachel vanished, the 94 days since my mother assured me she’d stopped drinking again, the 38 days since I signed my real name.

  I need to wrest back control. “You can’t keep adding conditions, Carl. Where did you get the twenty-dollar bill you left on the bed at the motel?”

  “Here you go, honey.” The waitress, interrupting, clanking down Carl’s breakfast.

  “I remember you from somewhere,” he tells her. “Your name is Annette. No, Lynette. Pretty name. Pretty lady.” She flashes beige teeth. I want to shriek, It’s on your name tag, you idiot. He will eat you alive.

  I’m watching Carl unfurl into catnip for an aging waitress wearing a button that says Don’t go bacon’ my heart. I feel a violent urge to mark out the apostrophe. I can tell that Lynette is unsure how to proceed with Carl because of me. Competition, she’s thinking, but what kind?

  “This is my daughter.” Carl, helping her out.

  “You sure you don’t want more than that little box of cereal?” she asks, refilling my coffee. “You’re such a tiny thing.”

  “No, thanks. I’m good.” Being nice to me won’t get you into Carl’s jeans and out of that one-bedroom, Lynette.

  I’m unsympathetic to her lifetime plight of picking dangerous men, to the teen who may hustle Texas out of an abortion, to the middle-aged woman alone with her black-no-cream-please cup of coffee whose head is softly brushing the back of mine, to myself for already feeling vulnerable when I’ve trained so very hard for this.

  “Stop playing around,” I hiss at Carl as soon as Lynette moves down the row.

  “What? You want me to lie about us, don’t you? She’s not my type anyway. Has one of those Shit Yous that barks like a girl. Drives a junker. Bad dancer.”

  “How do you…? Never mind.”

  “Dog hair on her pants, key to an ’87 Malibu hanging off that ring at her waist, which I also saw sitting in the parking lot. And she’s got high arches. They always come with some curly toes.”

  Carl wets his $6.99 Texas Slamski liberally with blueberry syrup, forks a chunk of Polish sausage and pancake, and slathers it around. “Delicious,” he proclaims too loudly. “Mrs. T is a burnt Eggos woman.”

  “Do not draw more attention to us,” I say.

  “Not trying to.”

  “Just keep your voice down.”

  “I’ve been thinking. You could be another cop, tricking me. A reporter writing a book.”

  “We’ve been over this. Do I look like a cop, Carl?”

  At the word cop, the teenager flips a third of the way around, thinks better of it, and goes back to tapping on her phone.

  “We made a deal,” I tell Carl. “You said you would try. That you’d be honest if I fulfilled your conditions. That you’d keep an open mind about our relationship.” He didn’t say any of these things.

  “I’ll be as honest as you are, how about that. So far, you are two for thirty-one on the conditions. Maybe we should write a book. A man with dementia and his long-lost daughter toddle off on a road trip across Texas solving cold cases to figure out if he’s really a serial killer. Clint could play me in the movie. Or the Bridges brother, the younger one, The Dude. Elizabeth Taylor could play you if she had a nose ring and vanilla wafers for boobs and she was alive. I’d like to walk into the desert at the end. I know just the spot.”

  He pours more syrup in the blank space where his pancakes were. With his spoon, he traces either a heart or Elizabeth Taylor’s boobs, then smears it all away.

  The cheap material of the scarf is starting to itch the back of my neck. Send shivers.

  Still, I don’t remove it. Still, Carl does not say a word.

  “Is this just a big joke to you?” I hiss. “Women died.”

  “How do you know, if no one ever found them? I’ve read a few things about me, too.”

  Before this can register, Lynette is back, snagging up his plate, her chest murmuring against his shoulder. “Who gets the check?” she asks cheerfully.

  “My daughter here will take that,” he says. “I’ll be leaving the tip.” He lays a ten in Lynette’s palm. Keeps his hand there for a few beats, marking her. When she’s gone, he starts popping the pills like they were peppermints she dropped off.

  “A jury declared me guilty of taking pictures,” he says. “I’ve decided I have no reason to doubt them.”

  My eyes are on Lynette, pulling away plates from a table of men in trucker hats. Breasts at work again. Money changing hands. I’m feeling bad about my snap judgment. Lynette is probably way less of a fool than I am.

  She’s pausing at the register with her stack of dirty plates, now do
ing double duty as cashier. The woman who had been sitting behind me is paying her bill. Her pillowed waistline and Clarks shoes say mom. Her demeanor to Lynette says kind.

  And if Carl’s right, the size of the square-cut diamond on her left hand says there’s a lot for her to lose. Carl and I, we’re into the details.

  She’s slipping off sunglasses so she can sign her name, a bruise the color of blueberries under her right eye.

  “Cute scarf,” Carl says.

  11

  When I was eight, three years after my sister fell into that grave, I wrote down every fear I could think of in a notebook. I already had a bunch by then. I worked my way methodically through them. I started with the little ones—picking up a tarantula by the leg, eating a jalapeño whole, lighting firecrackers—and moved on to riding the most vicious roller coasters hands-free until I didn’t scream anymore.

  Every year, I crossed off two or three and added four or five more.

  At twelve, after my sister vanished, I dug deeper. I held a gun in my hand until it wasn’t shaking anymore. I flopped like a pushed cat into the deep end of aquamarine pools until I could knife my body into a lake, drive down through black muck, brush the bottom, and swim up with my lungs boiling.

  At nineteen, I skydived from a prop plane, zip-lined across a thin crevice that dove to hell, slid in Nikes on a frozen pond where catfish slept. At twenty, I chased an ominous funnel until my old Toyota gave up and shuddered to a stop, defeated, willing to be swept away.

  Every time, my heart was exploding out of my chest.

  My last boyfriend told me I had a death wish right before he broke up with me. He didn’t understand: I have a brave wish.

  I glance sideways at Carl in the passenger seat. We left Lynette and her diner less than ten minutes ago. His lips are a tight line. If he only knew. For the last year, I’ve upped my game. I’ve paid someone to scare me to death. To be suspended in air, blindfolded, and dropped, not knowing if the next seconds would bring the lash of glacial water, the taut rejection of a trampoline, a desperate tumble down an endless hill.